The greatest named place in Britain is inviting applicants for possibly the country's greatest job – to become the modern-day counterpart to the legendary witch of Wookey Hole.

The Somerset caves have long been home to a witch turned to stone in the middle ages by a Benedictine monk with a flair for that kind of thing called Father Bernard. Now, however, the popular tourist attraction is in need of someone with a wider skill set than that possessed by the average vaguely person-shaped rocky outcropping, and is advertising for a living witch to take up residence in the caves at weekends, school holidays and special occasions such as Halloween.

I am instantly drawn to the chance to become part of living history. I almost do not notice the advertised £50,000 per annum pro rata remuneration package – that's right, £50k!

All I have to do is fill in an application pack (including a 500-word description of my suitability for the role – hurrah! I have waited more than 30 years to be able to turn my third nipple into a major selling point), confirm that I am not allergic to cats and turn up to the open auditions on 28 July. "You must be in costume and ready to perform," says the caves' marketing director Gayle Pennington. No problem. My mother can make up for her dereliction of many early maternal duties by making me something fabulous out of tattered binliners and fashioning warts from bits of bread. What else?

"You must have excellent customer service skills," says Pennington. Hmm. I was hoping that my undergraduate reading of Macbeth and Malleus Maleficarum would be grounding enough. It seems that today's witch must not only know her eye of newt and toe of frog from a fillet of a fenny snake, but be able to meet and greet visitors throughout the day, regardless of how many livestock need cursing or crops poisoned. Wicked witches are, apparently, sooo two-to-four-centuries ago.

"We are a family attraction," explains Pennington. "So we don't want a nasty witch but quite a nice, friendly one with a slightly devilish element." That's OK. I'll just get my mother to go easy on the warts. Anything else?

"And you've got to be able to cackle," says Pennington. Hmm. I clear my throat, take a deep breath and give it my best shot. Unfortunately, I am thinking of the £50,000 a year and it comes out more deliriously happy than frightening. There is a pause. "Not bad," Pennington says unconvincingly. So, I should turn up on 28 July? Another hesitation. I would say it provides ample space in which to read between the lines. "By all means, try out," she says eventually. "But we do . . . we do have quite a high standard of talent coming in."

I hope she hasn't got any crops or livestock she depends on. Because if so, she's going to be sorry.

Stephen Fry's letter to his 16-year-old self (G2, 30 April) struck a chord: it was so wise, telling himself that the search for love is always painful and difficult and that being gay or straight doesn't change that – Aoife White, Brussels, Belgium

I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter (reproduced in your 1997 autobiography Moab Is My Washpot) that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal.

Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed . . . the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out ...

An absolute favourite is by Charlie Brooker: Remember those dreamlike images of Dubai? (G2, 30 November). It brilliantly demonstrates how the selfishness of those in power lose touch with humanity through exclusivity, greed and exploitation. It also includes the best description of Las Vegas I have ever read – Jo Ball, London N7

I'm no expert on Dubai. Never been there, and only read about it in passing. The one thing I knew was that everything I heard about it sounded impossible. It was a modern dreamland. A concrete hallucination. A sarcastic version of Las Vegas. Dubai's skyline was dotted with gigantic whimsical behemoths. There were six-star hotels shaped like sails or shoes or starfish. Skyscrapers so tall the moon had to steer its way around them. It had immense off-shore developments: man-made archipelagos that resembled levels from Super Mario Sunshine. One was in the shape of a spreading palm tree. Another consisted of artificial islands representing every country in the world in miniature. As if that wasn't enough, a proposed future development called The Universe would depict the entire solar system.

When I first read about all this stuff, I felt a bit uneasy. None of it sounded real or even vaguely sustainable. I'd been to Las Vegas a few times and seen crazy developments come and go.

The first time I visited, the hot new attractions were the Luxor, an immense onyx pyramid, and Treasure Island, a pirate fantasy world replete with lifesize galleons bobbing outside it. Roughly halfway between the pair of them, a replica New York was under construction. By my next visit, the novelty value of both the Luxor and Treasure Island had long since palled, and they now seemed less exotic than Chessington World of Adventures. Meanwhile, unreal New York had been joined by unreal Paris and unreal Venice.

But even at their most huge and demented, none of these insane monuments looked as huge and demented as the projects announced in Dubai. Yet the novelties, while larger, were wearing thin even more quickly. Dubai's The World archipelago hadn't even opened when the same developers announced The Universe, thereby making The World sound like a rather diminished prototype before anyone had moved in.

In Las Vegas the grimy engine that paid for each new chunk of mega-casino was there in plain sight at street level: woozy drunks thumbing coins into slots 24 hours a day. Hundreds of thousands of them, slumped semi-conscious in rows like dozing cattle hooked up to milking machines. Ching ching ching, slurp slurp slurp. It was like watching a gigantic crystal spider increasing in size as it coldly sapped the husks of its victims. Ugly, but at least it made sense.

Where were the coin slots in Dubai? I had no idea. I just gawped at the photographs and was secretly impressed by the cleverness of the people who'd managed to generate so much money they could safely take leave of their senses and construct 300ft buttplug skyscrapers and artificial floating cities shaped like doodles scribbled in the margins of sanity.

The one that stuck in my mind was Amelia Gentleman's poignant look inside the Dignitas house near Zurich (G2, 18 November). It was touching, revealing, melancholic, uplifting and deeply moving – an astonishing read. Stefano Notarangelo, Putnoe, Bedford

The room at the Dignitas house, near Zurich, in which people end their lives. Photograph: David Levene

... People who travel to Switzerland to die with Dignitas are encouraged to come with family and friends, who stay with them as they drink the lethal dose. One person brought 12 friends with him. Dignitas staff are happy to give advice on good restaurants for a final meal, nearby cinemas and excursions to the mountains, for the preceding days, but they observe that usually members are keen just to get on with dying.

Staff suggest that everyone should arrive at the flat at 11am (that way the police formalities that happen after the death can take place during office hours, which keeps the local officials in good humour).

[Ludwig] Minelli [founder of Dignitas] says he is never present at the deaths. Instead, Beatrice Bucher, a paid member of Dignitas staff who now works in the head office but has been a companion at more than 20 deaths, describes the process. She has a quietly compassionate tone, soothing and sympathetic, and believes strongly that she is performing an important role in society. "They need to know that they can go home at any time. I'm constantly asking if this is what they want. I have to be clear that this is really the moment," she says. On more than one occasion she has helped people return home who have changed their mind. "One woman still calls me to say thank you," she says.

The first stage happens at a round table, covered with a yellow tablecloth, where the two Dignitas companions sit with family members and the individual who is about to die to discuss the procedure. At this stage, a lot of documents must be signed setting out the desire to die. It is up to the members to decide when they are ready to take an anti-vomiting drug to prepare the stomach, and half an hour later, the lethal drug. "I tell them, 'You are the boss. You must tell me when it is time for me to prepare the drugs,'" Bucher says.

"If someone wants to talk about their life for six hours, we will never hurry them," Minelli says. "The music, all the details, are their choice. We are servants of their desire for self-determination."

Bucher stays with the family and goes through the documents. "Sometimes they will sit at the table and talk about their family and their life and we have a nice time. Sometimes the person who is going to die will appear to be angry and quite bossy, and tell me to hurry up, but I know it is not how they are feeling inside," she says.

She has to judge when the time is right for both the person who wants to die, and their relatives. "Once I had a mother – not so old, in her 50s – who was really ill. She came with her daughter who was perhaps 25. The mother was very firm that she would go quickly and that it was not a problem. She told the daughter that she was not to cry and made her go and stand in the kitchen. I had to explain that this is not the way, you should not tell your daughter she cannot cry," she says. Staff also suggest that relatives stay to witness the death, because they believe this helps with the mourning process.

People are encouraged to lie down, because if they die sitting up at the table, their mouth drops open and their body slumps, and it is harder for the family to watch the process. "Then we install the film in the video camera, but I am always asking 'Do you need more time?' Usually they are calm. Most of them are in a lot of pain and they know that this drink will end it for ever."

How difficult is it for a manufactured five-member girl band to seriously succeed in today's pop landscape? Knowing how crystal-clear the following analogy will make it for readers of this column, Lost in Showbiz would say this: it's basically as hard as it is in modern cricket for an off-spinner to achieve the dominance of yesteryear. Covered pitches, a Cowell-soloist-dominated marketplace: so many things make it hard to see how the scorched-earth ascent of the Spice Girls or Jim Laker could be replicated. Certainly not without a suspect bowling action.

Let's abstain on the question of whether the ladies pictured below are chuckers, as you will doubtless be plagued by more basic inquiries. Like, who are these five sirens, beamed with increasing frequency into my home, armed with only their radioactive stage-school ambition and the complete set of Topshop's 80-denier coloured opaque tights? Why are they gaining traction on the weaker of my neurons? And does their landing of the official Comic Relief single mean they are now launching their land offensive?

The answer is that they are the Saturdays, they have you in missile lock and, at this stage, resistance is looking fairly futile.

Yes, you've been conned before into making sub-prime emotional investments in bands such as Precious, Hepburn, or Girl Thing. But with each industry failure the process is refined and the Saturdays are the latest attempt at creating a sort of ckin2u-scented Justice League. Forged in the hellfires of Polydor's labs, they were created by a crack team of the record label's scientists. Many of these men are former CIA boffins now on the run from the agency, and lead a twilight existence, growing prospective female band members in petri dishes.

To fashion the Saturdays, the labcoats took two former members of S Club Juniors, proving that there are second acts in manufactured pop lives – though they're still likely to end when you're 25. The rest of the band are replicants (basic pleasure model).

Polydor, of course, is also home to Girls Aloud, whom the Saturdays supported on their recent tour, but eventually pledge to crush, a bit like those baby spiders who eat their mothers.

"Eventually we want to be bigger than them," say the band, "but at the moment we just want to go head-to-head with them."

To this end, the girls have scored the cover of this month's FHM. I know what you're asking: is FHM still going? Well, there's a pulse. But it's in a persistent vegetative state. The current issue features an Antony Worrall-Thompson recipe for cheese toasties. "In an effort to reduce the amount of processed carbohydrates," begins Woz, "I've cut out the top slice of bread."

Anyway, the mag loves the Saturdays, explaining that group member "Una Healy's gift for reading music lends a veneer of Noel Gallagher-style credibility to the band."

This was the best and most moving article this year (Family, 2 May). It was so good I cut it out and kept it – Gin Foster, Hankelow, Ches

Over the last 40 weeks, while I've been writing this column each Saturday, my wife has been carefully extracting atoms from carrots, onions, fried fish, cheese slices, Easter eggs, apples and Weetabix, rejigging them slightly and assembling them into the form of a human baby. The atoms in these foods my wife has been eating were themselves once part of the air and the sea and the soil, and before that they belonged to comets' tails, or to the clouds of ions scudding across the infinite blackness of space. To put it another way, while I've been assembling dad jokes out of common English words, my wife has been building a child out of stardust. Something tells me only one of us is going to get the Blue Peter badge.

My wife won't tell me how she builds the baby, and I definitely don't think I could do it myself. In these respects, the process resembles bread-making, rodeo, spreadsheets, navigation in city centres, dancing, macroeconomics, and gracefulness: it's just one more thing she can do and I can't. And yet the baby-assembly trick is one I find particularly humbling whenever we get together to compare our respective days – something we like to do each evening over drinks. In my case, specifically, four drinks. In her case, non-alcoholic. Sometimes I wonder if this means I'm drinking alone. It's one of many soulful questions asked by the partners of pregnant women, questions that include "why does my wife burst into tears now when she sees a baby squirrel?" and "why must the missus have coal to eat right this minute?"

I like to get these queries in early when my wife and I discuss our days – I need to score a few cheap points since I know I'm about to get outclassed big time. Because my day usually goes something like: "Monkey done write text. Now monkey tired. Monkey's fingers sore from monkeytypewriter1." While my wife's day goes more like this: "Oh, so this morning I was basically just reading gene sequences off the chromosomes you lent me and using them to work out where I should put various atoms I've been extracting from celery and doughnuts and Marmite. While avoiding booze and unpasteurised cheese. And then I changed our home insurance and saved us £200, and I did that in a French accent. Oooh, and then I went out and I bought these lovely pink shoes, and they only cost £199 because there was a sale, isn't that great?" And I have to admit that to create the miracle of pink loafers and to finish the day with a shoebox full of human life, all at a net saving of £1, is a really good trick.

As I write this, my wife is in the final stage of her pregnancy. Twice this week we've been sure our third child was arriving, and spent a night at the hospital before the contractions faded away and we sloped off home to wait some more. Our baby is a diva and a drama queen. Or maybe, like an actress contemplating her opening night, she's just a little bit frightened of stepping on to the stage. Whichever she is, even if I know she's made out of green tea and tangerines and biscuits, I'm looking forward to meeting her. These sleepless nights my wife and I have spent together in battered delivery rooms, on blue linoleum floors, under strip lights, quietly talking, have reminded us what a mystery this thing is. Out of atoms scrounged from the cosmos a human life has been formed. Put your hand on the right place and you can feel her heels drumming. Any time now she will be born and we will love her, maybe only for an hour or maybe for many years, until she or we must return our atoms into space. This is what it is. This quietly waiting in hope. For a life. For the time being. For seven pounds of stardust, borrowed from the dark.

I always turn to Michael Billington's reviews – erudite and articulate, he is a real star among theatre critics and should be included in any collection of the year's best writing. How about his review of Jude Law as Hamlet (News section, 4 June)? – Sarah Byrne, London SE23

... What exactly does Law bring to Hamlet? Principally, a sense of moody solitude and moral disgust. Pre-empting Shakespeare, [the producer, Michael] Grandage begins with a silent image of Law, in rumpled black shirt and wide-bottomed trousers, alone on a bare stage. And, even before he has seen the Ghost, Law's Hamlet is filled with gut-wrenching despair at Elsinore's pervasive corruption.

This is a Hamlet in whom the urge to action and revenge is constantly undermined by a built-in death wish: he seems incensed by the divine injunction against self-slaughter and, in the course of baiting Polonius, eagerly points a dagger at his own breast.

I missed the quicksilver humour that is part of Hamlet's character. But Law's Hamlet has the right inwardness and self-awareness. People who come to patronise him as a movie star essaying the great Dane will be in for a shock. He is a far-from-inexperienced classical actor and conveys the idea of Hamlet as a man who, as the critic John Wain once said, "cannot gear his meditation to action" and who is half in love with easeful death . . .

Without doubt my favourite article was the hilarious account of shopping for clothes by Martin Kelner (G2, 6 May). His wife, with new baby in tow, couldn't put up with the whingeing, constant demands for food etc – "and the baby was no picnic either". This phrase is now firmly embedded in Kite family lore. Do print it again! – Janet Kite, Whitegate, Ches

Martin Kelner clothes shopping in Leeds city centre for the first time in 27 years. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

Let me count the ways I dislike shopping for clothes. I do not like the blast of warm perfumed air that hits you in the face as you enter the store, and the assistants, dressed better than you could ever afford to. I hate the changing rooms; the unexpected mirror that catches the incipient paunch you thought you had under control. I am not crazy, quite frankly, about taking my clothes off in semi-public in any circumstances (which is why I never pursued a career in top-class sport). And that awkward walk, when you emerge from the changing room to get an opinion on the new threads, like a contestant on Stars In Their Eyes. How do you carry that off? Tonight, Matthew, I am going to be an idiot. The music irritates me as well, vacuous chart hits from Kool and the Gang and New Edition.

At least that was what they were playing when I last went clothes shopping in 1983. I am now exclusively dressed by my wife, which, I gather, is by no means unusual in married men of my vintage. I cannot claim to have undertaken an extensive survey, but I did speak to Krystina Turner, an assistant in Debenhams' menswear department in Leeds, and she told me she was quite accustomed to women holding up pairs of trousers and trying to imagine how they might look on their menfolk.

"Some men are forced into the store by their wives," she told me, "and you can tell they do not want to be here. 'Yeah, yeah, it's fine,' they say when they try something on, and then they'll buy a handful of shirts and jumpers to last them the whole year so they do not have to come again."

Janet and I have been married 26 years and though we did try a few joint shopping expeditions in the early days, it soon became clear that I was not giving it 110%, not showing the kind of commitment she was looking for. I gave myself away in lots of different ways. "Do you like this jacket?" she would say, holding one against me. "Brilliant," I would reply. "Let's get it. Is it my size?" It might as well have been a canary-yellow crushed-velvet cummerbund she was holding, because in my mind I was already thumbing through the racks at Jumbo Records.

Then we started having children – not right there in the store, obviously – and shopping expeditions en famille, given the extensive kit requirements of a small child, became just too tough a gig. My wife, who loves shopping, said the fun was going out of it, what with all the crying and whingeing and constant demands to be fed – and the baby was no picnic, either – so I volunteered to stay home and do the nappy changing, and later the swing pushing, and then see my son through his junior football career.

Baboons have stardust qualities; it was a moving leader (News section, 27 October) and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Now I am a fan of the "In praise of . . ." column – Raghu Shetty, Whyteleafe, Surrey

"Baboons," wrote the distinguished American biologist George B Schaller, "live in a peaceful society in which not aggression but friendship achieves the desired result." He found it humbling to contemplate the social intelligence of the primates. "Baboons are individuals; each has its own temperament and idiosyncrasies, each has its own desires and goals . . . scientific papers cannot express the fundamental charm, the fleeting social entanglements, the perishable moments of a baboon's life."

Schaller believed that studying baboons would help humans to a better understanding of how to live in peace, harmony, cooperation and friendship: "A contemplation of baboons can help humankind correct a skewed vision of itself." And then there are celebrity restaurant critics. AA Gill, in the course of reviewing a meal in the Sunday Times, described the pleasure of shooting a baboon, which he did last Wednesday. He apparently blew its lungs out with a soft-nosed .357 – essentially for the "naughty fun" of it. He was curious to find out "what it might really feel like to shoot someone, or someone's close relative". And then write it up in a column.

A few million years ago baboons and human beings were more closely related than now. At some point the species diverged, with one line evolving into hominids and, ultimately, restaurant critics. The other line has remained in Africa, living in simple but rather admirable societies where intelligence and advanced social skills are highly valued. Respect to the baboon.

It's difficult to pinpoint a particular one – any of Nancy Banks-Smith's pieces on Ambridge would do it. They are hilarious. In fact, why don't you do a book of her TV/film/radio reviews? (G2, 24 June) – Gwyneth Cooper, Chester

"This strange woman came in."

"What were strange about her?"

"Well, she weren't from round here."

As this exchange in the village shop suggests, it's not easy to fit into Ambridge unless your name's Archer, and Vicky doesn't seem to have a surname. She comes from the bright lights of Borchester, and Ambridge is in two minds about her. The men are largely appreciative ("Good lord! She's young and not a bad looker!"). The women less so.

Brenda and Tom had just announced their engagement when Brenda's dad, Mike the one-eyed milkman, effortlessly trumped them by announcing his engagement to Vicky, a dentist's assistant he met while jitterbugging ("One, two, catch and under!"). Mike is 60 but agile with it.

Ever since he met Vicky, Mike has been a glowing ball of satisfaction, a sort of solar-powered milkman. Vicky's personality expands to fill the space available. Her laughter bounces off the wall. She arrived in his life, as Sylvester Stallone said of his second wife, on a trapeze with her hair on fire. You would be looking at Vicky for some time before you were reminded of a shrinking violet. A sukebind, perhaps. I don't know if you are acquainted with the sukebind and its embarrassing side effects? It's a very rural thing. According to Cold Comfort Farm, the sukebind is: "A large flower whose petals sprang back like snarling fangs to show the shameless heart that sent out full gusts of sweetness." It blooms at midsummer and drives men mad. It is midsummer.

Theirs has been as whirlwind romance. Mike had only been throwing Vicky about for three weeks ("Oh Mike, you're so strong!" "Oh Vicky you're so light!") when he proposed. They are to be married on July 15, which must make him the fastest milkman in the west.

Brenda, her nose thoroughly out of joint, thinks Vicky is after Mike's milk money. We all think he's hit the jackpot.

George Monbiot's article on canoe fishing (Guardian Weekend, 22 August) was a magical account of his pastime and a gentler side of the belligerent campaigner – Simon Hodges, Baarn, Netherlands

George Monbiot: fishing from a sea kayak. Photograph: Dominick Tyler

Kayaking saved me. Living in Oxford without a car, I felt throttled by the ring road, the city's concrete necklace. I was heartsick, dried up, deprived of nature. At weekends I'd explore the city's green spaces or cycle into the countryside, but I found only sterility: pasteurised parks, perfect rows of rape and wheat, woods picked clean by pheasants. Walking by a stream one day, I realised that the land might be dead but the water was alive. I bought an old kayak for a tenner and dragged it down to the Thames. As soon as I sat in it, I felt I belonged there.

Oxford was built on a swamp. Though wrung from the ground, the water is still there, forced into a labyrinth of drains and feeders, most of them unknown, overgrown, blocked by rubbish and fallen trees. I set out to explore them. I pushed through rush-choked channels scarcely wider than my boat. I found backwaters no one had navigated for years. I stumbled across cannabis gardens and camouflaged shelters where fugitives lived. I dragged my kayak out of the water and through the branches of fallen trees. I'd come home covered in mud and duckweed, scratched to ribbons and thrilled to be alive. I saw mink, roe deer, water rails, kingfishers, sandpipers, the debris of fish and clams eaten by otters, all within the bounds of the city.

From the water, everything looked different. Curtained by trees, fish-shadowed, a channel between the park-and-ride and the dump became a tributary of the Amazon. Abandoned behind railway fences, on the edge of playing fields, anonymously skirting business units, I found places I had never imagined possible, a parallel world. In these hidden corners I also saw great shoals of chub and bream, a giant carp slurping at scum in a neglected drain, barbel furrowing away. But I wasn't interested. After years away from the water, I was ready to start fishing again, but I wanted to catch only fish I could eat.

It was fishing that cemented my love of the natural world. As a boy, I'd sit on the riverbank, seldom catching much, gazing at the insects and birds, watching the fish. The thrill of seeing a vast, lazy tail appear beneath a sunken tree, or dark backs of dace flick in and out of the shadows, or the head of a pike emerge from the darkness – this was all the world I needed. While other children fantasised about space or treasure islands, I submerged myself in the dim green cosmos beneath the water, guessed at but never fathomed. Now there was something else I wanted: a way out of the planet-eating food economy.

I love food, but I hate the way it is produced. There used to be a surplus of allotments in Oxford: I took on five and became an urban smallholder. But I had given up eating fish. I knew commercial fishermen possess a mysterious power over governments, which ensures quotas are too high, reefs can be smashed by beam trawlers, dolphins, turtles and albatrosses snared and discarded. I knew if I was to eat fish, I'd have to catch my own . . .

As a lover of the Lake District, the article that will stick in my mind for a long time will be the Country Diary on the floods and destruction within the Lake District by Tony Greenbank (News section, 23 November). The author skilfully described the onset of the deluge, the tragic effects on the people and the landscape they live and work in and, finally, the spirit of a stoic people – Ernie Williams, Coalville, Leics

The luminous crescent moon glimmering against the silhouette of Ambleside church spire on Thursday belied the driving rain that had just fallen during the day. The heavens had opened, causing the biggest downpour in Britain's history with more than a foot of rain (12.3in) falling in 24 hours. The Environment Agency gauge at Seathwaite, for long known as the wettest spot in England, recorded the new "high" – 314.4mm. The deluge triggered mayhem, having already been primed by earlier rain. Sheets of precipitation ran off the waterlogged ground and into the becks and rivers, which stampeded downhill causing landslides and destroying bridges and collapsing embankments. From Buttermere with its landslips of shale spilling across the road above Crummock Water (and with two bridges destroyed near Lorton) to Thirlmere where the A591 was blocked by a landslide, few Lakeland valleys escaped. Waterfalls cascaded down crags, sweeping scree on to roads so that rocks litter the tarmac, some big enough to have smashed through drystone walls and leave gouges in the fellsides in their wake.

The roads in many valleys are closed, with bridges at the time of writing awaiting safety checks. Great Langdale has been cut off, with its locals having to negotiate the challenge of notorious Red Bank, a car's width wide on its one-in-four gradient, for what would ordinarily be everyday journeys. All this pales into insignificance against the flood damage in the towns of Keswick, Cockermouth and Workington caused by torrenting rivers booming down from the hills. Hundreds have been made homeless and PC Bill Barker was killed guiding people away from the Workington bridge, which was about to be swept away by the combined force of the rivers Derwent and Cocker, the town now split from its component part of Seaton. It is in accepting things could have been still worse that Lakeland folk, saddened by events, keep on keeping calm and carrying on in the traditional spirit among these capricious fells.

This was my favourite article (News section, 1 October)– it impressed me not surprisingly, as I was born in Maerdy in 1930 and was one of the kids who "walked linking hands and singing 'Vote, vote, vote for Arthur Horner'" – Dorothy Ryan, Hitchin, Herts

A dust cloud of memories has been kicked up over the last few days, which I have spent watching the BFI's latest DVD, Portrait of a Miner – made up of films from the National Coal Board's archive. Maybe it's a coincidence that its release comes in the 25th anniversary year of the miners' strike – the BFI cinema on London's South Bank has seasons on shipbuilding and steel lined up for the next two years – but the unearthing and memorialising of these films can't have come too soon.

Any commentary and commemoration to mark the anniversary has, to these eyes, seemed muted, almost as though no one's sure what to think about it. There have been as few defenders of Arthur Scargill as of Margaret Thatcher, but aside from that there's been a sense that times have moved on, that their war was somehow cleansing and necessary.

For today's working population, a job as physically demanding as mining is hard to compute; most work today is more about mental stress than bodily endurance. When I imagine my great-grandad, a miner who died in his 30s of lung disease exacerbated by a pit accident, I see a tiny man with muscles like boulders, and four daughters who dreamed of doing well at school and seeking sparklier things than coal dust.

Because there was no son who could replace him as an earner, his daughters were sent one by one into domestic service, and factory work in Cardiff: my nan was sent to a household in Carshalton, in Surrey – to where she had no idea she was going until the last minute.

My late auntie, one of those daughters, remembered more than my nan – traumatised by her experiences – was prepared to. When I interviewed her in 1994, for an A-level essay on the general strike, she pictured her father walking out of the house with his tin of "snap" – his food, usually bread and dripping – and flask of water. Come election time, the kids would link hands and thread down Maerdy Road singing "Vote, vote, vote for Arthur Horner", in support of the communist miners' leader from nearby Merthyr Tydfil.

The sisters having dispersed – three to Birmingham, one to El Paso in Texas – by the time I was born, there were only a few visits back to the Rhondda before my great-grandmother's death in 1985. We went once in 1981, in the depths of recession, and again in 1984, mid-strike. On both trips I remember being the only child among grieving adults, scrabbling over the rubbly, grey-and-green landscape, and the men having to get out of the minibus to shoo sheep away halfway up the road from Aberdare . . .

Your reprint of Peter Bradshaw's blitzkrieg on Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds reminded me what fun he is when he dislikes a film. I particularly liked his trashing of Terminator: Salvation (Film and Music, 5 June) – James Chambers, Birmingham

Christian Bale in Terminator Salvation. Photograph: PR

... If the contest was about who can be the dullest, [Christian] Bale would win hands down. His belligerent, resentful facial expression is that of a stunned ox, or a vexed moose, or a rhino that thinks it's overheard someone calling its mum a slag. All the world has now heard the famous on-set meltdown that Bale had while making this film, weirdly maintaining his American accent while raging at director of photography Shane Hurlbut for messing with the lights while Bale was trying to do a scene. (Almost as many will have heard his apology, phoned into an LA radio station, expressing concern that anyone would have thought less of Hurlbut, and emphasising that he is in fact an outstanding professional.)

Perhaps the tantrum should be released as a bonus feature with the DVD – or perhaps it is rather that the film should be the bonus feature, and Bale's super-strop the main event. It is certainly more exciting and more deeply felt than anything in the fictional action.

The Terminators themselves, once so scary, are now starting to resemble a chorus line of grumpy C3POs. And despite being notionally formidable warriors, they have an unfortunate eccentricity, which is to prove convenient for the narrative. If you can get close enough to stab them in the back of the neck, they go limp and floppy for a good few minutes! What a very unfortunate design flaw for these Terminators. Why didn't the "machines", those implacable foes of humanity, think to stick a metal plate on the back of their necks?

Alberto Contador took the yellow jersey for the first time at the finish of stage 15. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

After two weeks of feinting and parrying, the 2009 Tour de France burst into life yesterday. Finally the favourites came out of hiding, ready to fight each other tooth and nail. And with half a dozen turns of his pedals on the zigzag ascent to a Swiss ski resort, Alberto Contador not only won himself the yellow jersey but may have shaped the outcome of a race that still has six stages and almost 800km of racing to come.

It was a day that began with the riders swaddled against the driving rain and shivering mid-morning temperatures in Pontarlier and ended, just over five hours later, with sweat-streaked limbs under a blazing Alpine sun. Contador's attack, which came shortly after the peloton had caught up with the exhausted remnants of a 12-man break, left his rivals floundering. Lance Armstrong, in particular, had no reply. Although the Texan is now in second place in the general classification, the 1min 37sec gap to Contador, his colleague in the Astana squad, looks all but unbridgeable.

Armstrong might even have a job maintaining his own nine-second advantage over Bradley Marc Wiggins CBE. The Londoner finished fifth in the stage after a scintillating ride, lifting himself to third in the overall standings and raising the possibility that Britain could have a finisher on the podium in Paris for the first time in the Tour's 106-year history, bettering Robert Millar's fourth place 25 years ago. . . Contador's coruscating attack came with just over 5km to go, about a third of the way up the 15 steepish ramps, linked by hairpin bends, that take the road through 600m of vertical ascent from the valley floor to Verbier's main square. He had planned to go later, but an acceleration by the Saxo Bank team had already reduced the leading group to a handful of survivors, and he knew his moment had come.

There had been a dress rehearsal nine days earlier, on a climb in Andorra, when the 27-year-old Madrileno suddenly switched on legs that are little thicker than the tubes of his bike and covered the last kilometre at a speed that took him to ninth place on the day and clear of his rivals in the overall standings. Yesterday he was riding for a stage victory, and for much more besides ...